You are assuming it needs to be replaced at all. These services are vapid additions to your life and once they are gone I think people will realize they didn't need to exist in the first place.
You're seriously generalizing. I only met my wife because of services like this; we met on Instagram and got to know each other over Twitter. I have other friends I similarly met and keep in contact with mainly over Twitter. I'm very glad the services exist.
There are alcoholics who have dozens of drinks a week and there are people who responsibly augment a night of socializing with a drink or two. Alcohol isn't fundamentally irredeemable because some people develop problems, and neither is social media.
My point was not that meeting people is at all related to alcohol(ism). My point was that both social media and alcohol can be used responsibly in beneficial ways.
Are you being sarcastic (serious question). Alcohol itself is chemically addictive and there are likely orders or magnitudes more people in the alcohol industry trying to make their alcoholic beverages more attractive (and thus spreading addictive substances further into the population) to consumers. It's an industry that easily tops over 1,000 Billion dollars globally.
I know what you're saying, but there's plenty of marketing behind alcohol, and it's already addictive to the point that withdrawal can literally kill you.
marketing doesn't make the product itself more addictive. Alcohol is physically addictive, but so is the dopamine hit you get from many social networking features. The point I was trying to make is that AFAIK no-one's trying to make alcohol the product more addictive, where there are many very intelligent people working to make Facebook the product more addictive.
Alcopops are a recent example of the alcohol industry finding a way to make their product more addictive (by adding sugar, another addictive substance).
Take my own changing habits, for example: over a span of 15 years, I "migrated" from MySpace to Tumblr to Reddit and a few news websites. I have only ever used Facebook except to promote a website. I think tens of millions of people, mostly young guys, prefer playing videos games over any form of social networking or even writing comments in response to ANY type of content.
And Discord really don't much power over their userbase unlike Facebook (have massive networking effect) and Twitter (have popular personalities). If Discord ever going to mess with things like censorship or forcing people into paid plans users could migrate really fast.
* Gamers are either tech-savvy or always have friends who are.
* Gamers stick to their small communities and leaders. If you superstar and announce that you're leaving Facebook nobody will follow, but gamers always follow their group / clan / whatever leaders.
* Also there is at least few companies like Valve, Blizzard, Epic Games who hold huge part of the market and have extremely loyal customers. They could certainly manage to set competition for Discord if there will be opening.
you are assuming that people only use these services for vapid interactions. plenty of people that live in censored countries use twitter to find out what is going on around them
I live in the US and I use Twitter to find out what is going on around me. For example, when I lose electrical power, my utility company posts updates on Twitter. My local TV stations and newspapers also post breaking news there.
The only reason those services use Twitter is because that's where all the people are. I'm not saying this isn't a beneficial use case, but Twitter isn't necessary for these kinds of services. I would even go so far as to say that corporate entities using Twitter to provide their users a service (outage reports) they should pay for the privilege or be forced to set up their own notification networks.
There are alcoholics who have dozens of drinks a week and there are people who responsibly augment a night of socializing with a drink or two. Alcohol isn't fundamentally irredeemable because some people develop problems, and neither is social media.